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Related papers: Neural Causal Abstractions

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Causal abstractions allow us to relate causal models on different levels of granularity. To ensure that the models agree on cause and effect, frameworks for causal abstractions define notions of consistency. Two distinct methods for causal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Willem Schooltink , Fabio Massimo Zennaro

Humans interpret the world around them in terms of cause and effect and communicate their understanding of the world to each other in causal terms. These causal aspects of human cognition are thought to underlie humans' ability to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Richard D. Lange , Konrad P. Kording

Over the past two decades, considerable strides have been made in advancing neuroscientific techniques, yet challenges remain in attributing causality to observed associations. This review addresses a fundamental issue in observational…

Other Quantitative Biology · Quantitative Biology 2025-11-04 Eric W. Bridgeford , Brian S. Caffo , Maya B. Mathur , Russell A. Poldrack

Neural networks are hypothesized to implement interpretable causal mechanisms, yet verifying this requires finding a causal abstraction -- a simpler, high-level Structural Causal Model (SCM) faithful to the network under interventions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Amir Asiaee

Causality has the potential to truly transform the way we solve a large number of real-world problems. Yet, so far, its potential largely remains to be unlocked as causality often requires crucial assumptions which cannot be tested in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Jeroen Berrevoets , Krzysztof Kacprzyk , Zhaozhi Qian , Mihaela van der Schaar

We consider a sequence of successively more restrictive definitions of abstraction for causal models, starting with a notion introduced by Rubenstein et al. (2017) called exact transformation that applies to probabilistic causal models,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-07-11 Sander Beckers , Joseph Y. Halpern

Modern Artificial Intelligence achieves remarkable predictive power by optimizing statistical risk functionals over vast corpora. Yet a gap separates this from genuine intelligence: the inability to distinguish correlation from causation.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-26 Ernest Fokoué

One of the central elements of any causal inference is an object called structural causal model (SCM), which represents a collection of mechanisms and exogenous sources of random variation of the system under investigation (Pearl, 2000). An…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-05 Kevin Xia , Kai-Zhan Lee , Yoshua Bengio , Elias Bareinboim

Causal abstraction is a promising theoretical framework for explainable artificial intelligence that defines when an interpretable high-level causal model is a faithful simplification of a low-level deep learning system. However, existing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Atticus Geiger , Zhengxuan Wu , Christopher Potts , Thomas Icard , Noah D. Goodman

An abstraction can be used to relate two structural causal models representing the same system at different levels of resolution. Learning abstractions which guarantee consistency with respect to interventional distributions would allow one…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Fabio Massimo Zennaro , Máté Drávucz , Geanina Apachitei , W. Dhammika Widanage , Theodoros Damoulas

Causality plays an important role in understanding intelligent behavior, and there is a wealth of literature on mathematical models for causality, most of which is focused on causal graphs. Causal graphs are a powerful tool for a wide range…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Scott Garrabrant , Matthias Georg Mayer , Magdalena Wache , Leon Lang , Sam Eisenstat , Holger Dell

As an essential component of human cognition, cause-effect relations appear frequently in text, and curating cause-effect relations from text helps in building causal networks for predictive tasks. Existing causality extraction techniques…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Jie Yang , Soyeon Caren Han , Josiah Poon

Complex adaptive agents consistently achieve their goals by solving problems that seem to require an understanding of causal information, information pertaining to the causal relationships that exist among elements of combined…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Filippo Torresan , Manuel Baltieri

Working with causal models at different levels of abstraction is an important feature of science. Existing work has already considered the problem of expressing formally the relation of abstraction between causal models. In this paper, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Fabio Massimo Zennaro , Paolo Turrini , Theodoros Damoulas

A key feature of intelligent behaviour is the ability to learn abstract strategies that scale and transfer to unfamiliar problems. An abstract strategy solves every sample from a problem class, no matter its representation or complexity --…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Daniel Tanneberg , Elmar Rueckert , Jan Peters

We present a method for diagnosing interpretation in neural networks by identifying an input subspace where a proposed interpretation is highly faithful. Our method is particularly useful for causal-abstraction-style interpretability, where…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Li Puyin , Jiyuan Tan , Ahmad Jabbar , Thomas Icard , Atticus Geiger

This note illustrates how a variety of causal abstraction arXiv:1707.00819 arXiv:1812.03789, defined here as causal abstractive simulation, can be used to formalize a simple example of language model simulation. This note considers the case…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Gabriel Simmons

Abstraction is a powerful idea widely used in science, to model, reason and explain the behavior of systems in a more tractable search space, by omitting irrelevant details. While notions of abstraction have matured for deterministic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-01-14 Vaishak Belle

Artificial intelligence has made great strides in the last decade but still falls short of the human brain, the best-known example of intelligence. Not much is known of the neural processes that allow the brain to make the leap to achieve…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-08-13 Ananta Nair

Causal learning has garnered significant attention in recent years because it reveals the essential relationships that underpin phenomena and delineates the mechanisms by which the world evolves. Nevertheless, traditional causal learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Zizhen Deng , Xiaolong Zheng , Hu Tian , Daniel Dajun Zeng